rAge 2013: Nothing Rivals The New Need For Speed In Visuals

When asked to describe the new Need For Speed title after playing it at rAge 2013, my immediate response was: “It’s the most beautiful Burnout title I’ve seen.”

Now that’s not entirely fair to Ghost Games, who are most definitely not Criterion — or, those developers that are only capable of making one type of game (except for Black) — but that was my initial thought as I waited in line to play the game. Incidentally, the games were running on PCs, but the demo screens showed PS4 controls, which is great except there were Xbox controllers being used to play the game. Seriously.

Rivals is a beautiful game. I need to emphasise that again. It truly is fucking amazing to behold. I sat in awe of those visuals, so much so that I kept crashing into things because I was so busy trying to figure out how they managed to pull off that kind of visceral fidelity on today’s hardware. Frostbite 3 is an absolute wonder-creation of a game engine.

The game itself is an open world racer that is closest in comparison to Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2. It’s got cops versus robbers styled modes that pit racers against police and vice versa. It’s got challenges for both parties as well, ranging from a whole bunch of things. Let’s call them objectives for each player. You could opt to be a racer or a cop, and what you do in the game is entirely your choice.

Did I mention how beautiful the game is? I cannot emphasise that enough. I know that graphics aren’t really that important but that’s like virgins saying that sex is overrated. When you’ve enjoyed those kinds of visuals, you learn to appreciate it. And it helps that there’s a very functional racer built on top of it. It’s NFS, right? What more can we say. There’ll be beautiful, licensed cars. There’ll be some really nice tracks to race through. There’ll be cops trying to spoil your fun.